The Off-Targets of Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats Gene Editing

Manuel M Vicente; Miguel Chaves-Ferreira; João M P Jorge; João T Proença; Vasco M Barreto

doi:10.3389/fcell.2021.718466

The Off-Targets of Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats Gene Editing

Front Cell Dev Biol. 2021 Sep 17:9:718466. doi: 10.3389/fcell.2021.718466. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Manuel M Vicente¹, Miguel Chaves-Ferreira¹, João M P Jorge¹, João T Proença¹, Vasco M Barreto¹

Affiliation

¹ DNA Breaks Group, NOVA Medical School (NMS), Centro de Estudos de Doenças Crónicas (CEDOC), NOVA University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal.

Abstract

The repurposing of the CRISPR/Cas bacterial defense system against bacteriophages as simple and flexible molecular tools has revolutionized the field of gene editing. These tools are now widely used in basic research and clinical trials involving human somatic cells. However, a global moratorium on all clinical uses of human germline editing has been proposed because the technology still lacks the required efficacy and safety. Here we focus on the approaches developed since 2013 to decrease the frequency of unwanted mutations (the off-targets) during CRISPR-based gene editing.

Keywords: CRISPR/Cas9; Cas9 variants; DNA repair; gene editing; off-targets.

Publication types

Review